Abstract
Like, I suspect, many other researchers working on the modernist period, I have been struck in recent months by just how little I know about the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Published with extraordinary timing in 2019/20, Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature sets out to fill this critical gap and to explore some of the reasons behind its existence. Reading such a book as the coronavirus lockdown measures are starting to be lifted in the UK has certainly been a particularly strange experience among many this year. Thankfully, though, Outka’s highlighting of traces of the influenza pandemic in texts that are now nearly one hundred years old is both fascinating and compelling.
The statistics in Outka’s opening paragraph are staggering: 50–100 million people died in the pandemic worldwide, including at least 228,000 in Britain alone. And yet, as Outka puts it, ‘the flu is rarely considered in modernist scholarship’ (p. 1), although she acknowledges that twenty-first-century historians have been rather more attentive to its presence. Outka’s opening chapter is itself rather more historical than literary in focus: it provides the basic details of the pandemic’s three waves, its symptoms, its impact, and it considers contemporary press and survivor accounts. These historical details establish the pertinent facts for the literary analyses that follow.
The central argument of Outka’s study is that, far from being absent from the literature of the period, traces of the pandemic can be found across modernist and interwar texts, but that to find them we need to change our way of reading them. Outka repeatedly talks about reading through a pandemic lens, contrasting this to the more common frame of the First World War. This change of emphasis has significant effects: for example, in her chapter on The Waste Land Outka shows how the domestic setting of much of the imagery that is often read in relation to the war can be seen as gesturing towards the mass death that took over the home front just as the war was coming to an end. Both at the time and since, the war has prevented us from seeing the pandemic clearly, and Outka uses Judith Butler’s ideas on the greater ‘grievability’ of certain deaths compared to others as a theoretical framework for her ideas (pp. 35–6). By providing a new way of reading modernist texts, one centrally focused on illness and the body rather than war, Outka’s approach also makes larger claims about how we might read other texts for ‘the many other gaps, silences, and untold stories waiting to be recognized’ (p. 101). In so doing, she also asks us to reconsider what counts as history.
Each engagement with an author begins with an account of their own specific experiences of the pandemic, creating a sense of its widespread yet individualised impact. The chapters in Parts I and II follow a non-chronological approach, starting with works written in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s in which references to the pandemic are explicit, before using these readings as a way to reveal ‘the more subtle ways the pandemic weaves its way into earlier modernist texts and into the canon’ (p. 99). While the texts considered in Part I may not be widely known, those in Part II are iconic: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919). Although only Woolf mentions influenza directly, Outka makes a compelling case for the relevance of the pandemic to all three works, providing startling new readings of texts about which so much has already been written. Outka’s attention in the chapter on Yeats to some of the changes made across different drafts of ‘The Second Coming’ provides an approach that is missing from other chapters, as well as suggesting a useful further avenue for research. Part III turns to interwar texts involving spiritualism and protozombie figures, both of which, in somewhat different ways, provided consolation and ‘understandable contagion narratives for popular audiences’ (p. 201).
Throughout her study, Outka provides attentive and detailed close readings of the content, language, imagery and form of her focal literary texts. In contrast, I found the readings of archival sources somewhat less nuanced: Outka uses survivor accounts drawn from letters written to the researcher Richard Collier in the 1970s and stories collected in the 2000s for the Pandemic Influenza Storybook run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, she pays no critical attention to the difference that the intervening years may have made to people’s memories and accounts, nor to the other factors that may have had a bearing on them – including, of course, the very literary texts analysed elsewhere in the book. Similarly, Outka’s comparisons of contemporary news reports with classic literary accounts of pandemics, including Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), do not consider the possibility that the tropes of the former had been influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the latter. Meanwhile, her exploration of Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, completed in December 1937 and published in 1939, fails to acknowledge the other factors that may have influenced Porter’s account of ‘the pandemic as a tragedy as devastating and important as the war’ at that particular time (p. 52).
Despite these minor reservations, Viral Modernism is a ground-breaking, field-changing book. It is also well written and wide ranging in its mixture of texts and themes. Outka argues for a more central place for narratives of the body and illness in the interwar period, explores the gendered implications of the traditional focus on war over illness and even, in her final chapter, highlights pandemic protozombies as ‘missing links in a long zombie tradition’ (p. 217). As a whole, Viral Modernism enhances our understanding of the modernist interwar moment by recapturing an aspect which has tended to be overlooked, if not forgotten altogether. It allows us to return to familiar modernist texts and read them in radically new ways – ways which, after reading this book, suddenly seem obvious. But, arriving at more or less the same time as a new global pandemic, Outka’s account also has the potential to inform our responses to our current health crisis.
In a chillingly prescient final paragraph on ‘the next severe global pandemic’, Outka makes a convincing case for the importance of reading for and remembering the 1918–19 pandemic in order to encourage action and spending on ‘effective global response systems’ (p. 254). There is an urgent and timely message here, both for work in modernist studies and for our current pandemic moment: we must learn to read for the pandemic’s presence in the past just as we must remember and act on the coronavirus pandemic as we move beyond it – lest we forget, again.